


if i only could make a deal with god (get him to swap our places)

by savage_starlight



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied Relationships, M/M, Role Reversal, Widomauk Week, Widomauk Week 2019, post episode 26
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 12:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19173019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savage_starlight/pseuds/savage_starlight
Summary: He dies in the middle of the road.(The Widomauk role-reversal AU oneshot nobody asked for, which may arguably become a longer thing at some point in my life. Written for Widomauk Week 2019 - Day 6; Role reversal/class swap.)





	if i only could make a deal with god (get him to swap our places)

**Author's Note:**

> Should I be writing angsty widomauk fic and posting it with barely any review at this hour? Probably not. Am I doing it anyway? Yep.
> 
> Meant to write more for widomauk week but wound up getting dragged full force into the beautiful pit known as the Good Omens fandom. Thus, while I'm hoping to finish up a few more of my drafts for widomauk week, it may get sidetracked by my inevitable need to write about the sheer dumbassery of an angel and demon failing to notice they are in love for 6000 years.
> 
> I digress. The title comes from the song "Running Up That Hill", as covered by Placebo. This style of writing is a bit experimental but I really like mocking about with fragmentary prose like this at times so hopefully it's at least not unbearable. Hope you all enjoy - is it Thursday yet???

He dies in the middle of the road.

The body lies crumpled in the dirt and snow, blood seeping into the frozen ground. At a distance, he could be mistaken for roadkill – some poor bastard trampled under a stampeding horse. But Mollymauk is not at a distance. He was there to watch the light disappear from Caleb’s eyes and he is there now and he knows with an angry, burning certainty that he will always be here in the cold, staring at this mess and the cart tracks that make their way down the road with his friends in them.

Sixty feet south of where the body he cannot name lies, there is a tree that is gashed over like some great animal has clawed at it for hours. In reality, it is the blade of Mollymauk’s scimitars that mars the bark as he swings them, the blades alight with the bloody rites he fights with and scarring deep into the wood while he swears and swears and yells into the wind until they’re both dull and the scimitars stick deep in the tree bark and won’t come out.

He kicks the tree then, his eyes burning as he swears he feels a toe break. Yells something crude in Infernal, then screams something even worse in Celestial because he’d asked Yasha to teach him all the good swears once and it’s not like Caleb is around to understand what he’s saying now anyway, now is he?

His shoulders shake with rage and grief. He rubs under his eyes, and all he can see is red.

* * *

The plan had seemed infallible, or at least like a damn solid one. They’d thought things out, had hidden their tracks, prepared perfectly. It had all gone according to plan. The horses had been stuck and the Shepherds had spread out and Molly’s blades had glowed with a holy fire he couldn’t help finding a bit ironic and they had been ready.

Then. Then.

Then Keg had cowered. Then Lorenzo had breathed ice like some white fucking dragon all over the lot of them, and they’d all felt half frozen except for Caleb, whose hair had been a bright orange that looked like flames in the snow even though it was tipped with ice, and he’d looked like a fucking angel or as close to one as Molly had ever seen. He’d lifted a hand and for a single, incredible moment, Lorenzo had _burned_ -

Then the barbarian’s blade had fallen on Caleb’s left leg. Then his lower spine, when he crumpled.

Lorenzo had smiled, skin still burning. The blade fell again.

* * *

“Should we burn him?”

He isn’t sure he’s heard the words right, when Nott first says them. The goblin girl looks like she’s drank her never-ending flask halfway to empty and her eyes are rimmed red from the booze and the tears. It makes the edges look a bit orange, really. Almost like flames. “What?”

“Caleb,” Nott repeats, and her voice cracks. “He’s always been good with fire.”

“Out of the question.” Molly’s hands clench and the nails dig into his skin until blood wells up, the stinging sensation familiar and oddly welcoming. He’s always been at his best when he’s bleeding. Maybe he can bleed something up to make this right.

“Nott’s right,” Beau says. “What if he comes back?”

“What if he does?” Molly snaps back. “There isn’t anything wrong with a nice resurrection.”

“This wasn’t some grand plan. This was everything going to shit, Molly.” Beau gestures to the body on the road fifty feet from them, the one none of them can bear to look at. “Whatever happened to you, it wasn’t that. He isn’t you.”

“No, he’s not. He’s a bloody  wizard who knows what he’s doing and he’s not dumb enough to die like that so clearly there’s some sort of backup plan-“

“There’s not,” Nott interjects, cutting him off with a thick and sticky voice. “He would have said if there was, to one of us. He was so clever, I know he would have.”

“That’s just it. He’s clever!”

“He _was._ ” Beau’s voice is almost a snarl, and if it wasn’t for the miserable way she wipes the back of her hand and smears the crummy makeup she’s been wearing possibly the entirety of the two months Molly’s know her across her face, he thinks he might be angry at her. “But he’s dead now, and sitting here in denial won’t get us any closer to getting him or the others back.”

Keg breaks in at that point, quiet, looking so much smaller in her armour than she has in the time since they’d all met her – gods, has it only been a day or two now? She looks up at the others with pain in her eyes, sympathy and guilt twisting across her face. “If you want the others back, you’re going to have to hurry. I don’t know if Lorenzo can bring anybody back with the way he is, but- well, there’s clearly a lot of shit I didn’t fucking know about him.”

Molly runs a hand through his hair, gets the fingers knotted on a chain that dangles from his horn. He yanks on it and winces when he hears the scrape as it carves across the bone, when the chain breaks on his finger and comes off in his hand, a string of silver and rubies that glint in the light. It reminds him of fire. He wonders, idly, if everything will remind him of fire now.

He glances at the corpse on the road, blood beneath it like a bed of roses. They cannot bring him back if there is no body for him to come back to. “We can’t burn him,” he says, and clenches his fist over the ruby’s gleam.

* * *

In the end, he gets Nott talked around to his side. It doesn’t take much effort, really. They don’t have time to argue and they don’t have the energy and he doesn’t think any of them really want to light the match anyway. Keg, who still seems like she can’t quite forgive herself for not being the one they’re throwing in the dirt, says she could manage, if they wanted. But they don’t.

Instead, they start to dig, by hand at first until Beau manages to cram some flat rocks onto the edges of sticks so they can attempt to shovel. It takes a long time, carving a hole like this into the earth. It’s a bad grave, shallow, the type any predator can dig up. Molly tells himself every step of the way that it is only temporary, that it is a placeholder, that they will not need this place for long. It’s a mantra, repetitive and calming in a sick way. It keeps him from trying to bury himself too.

* * *

When it’s done, it’s late in the afternoon. The sun sets red and they’ve laid the body into the ground, his arms wrapped over himself and his precious spellbooks in their lovely pouches. Keg thinks maybe Nott should take them because there could be something useful there, but Nott-

Nott drinks long and deep from her flask and pulls a copper wire from her pockets. She twists it around in a familiar set of gestures, and whispers into her hands. “Caleb,” she says, “I hope you know I’m stopping Keg from robbing you while you’re sleeping, so you should be very happy knowing that you’re in safe hands with us and you’ll have everything you had before when you wake up.” There is a moment of silence, a painful beat. “You can reply to this message.”

Nott bows her head. The wind does not respond.

* * *

 

Beauregard leaves a notebook in the grave, takes Caleb’s coin purse. It’s got all sorts of information in it about the Cobalt Soul thing she’s a part of and it’s probably some massive breach of protocol for her to leave it, but Molly doesn’t say anything to mock her about it. Not when she flips to the back page and sketches a map and beneath it writes something on the lines of _I don’t know if you’ll remember us because Molly didn’t when he went through this shit, but in case his weirdness rubbed off on you and you wake up I want you to find us. You’re good with directions and finding North. Head toward Zadash and the Gentleman at The Evening Nip. We’re gonna be back for you._ She sticks it in the pocket of his jacket and says something about vengeance, about getting people back.

Molly tunes most of it out, lost in the sea of his own grief and disbelief. Then Beau pulls him back in. Her eyes are still red, but now they’re burning with an anger he feels like it’s his own. “I know you don’t believe in fucking with the past, but we’re doing it,” she says, voice taut with determination. “Once we get Jester and the others back, we’re going after these bastards, and we’re going to work our way all the way back up the fucking chain until every single person who has ever dealt with these people is _done._ ”

“Yeah? Then what?” Molly wants to snarl, but he doesn’t have the energy.

“Then we keep going until we run out. That’s all I’ve got.”

Keg holds her cigarette out toward Beau. “I’ll smoke to that,” she says, and the monk takes a long, long drag.

* * *

 It goes like this: the body lies on the earth, eyes closed, thick and grimy coat pulled over the shirt to hide the grotesque stain of blood as best as any of them could manage. Molly pulls the tapestry of the platinum dragon from off his horse and shakes it out, tucking it around the corpse like it’s a blanket, like the body is just sleeping when he knows there’s no breath in its lungs.

He bows his head. The others are waiting. It’s time to go.

Molly grasps the broken chain from his horns and threads it between the fingers of the body in the corpse, presses a soft kiss to the grime streaked forehead, the ashen skin. He’s done this before, but he does not remember it being so cold, back in the mines. “Back in the game,” he murmurs, and brushes away a strand of red hair. “There’s time for this later.” He pulls a tarot card without looking and knows full well he has pulled the sun. He leaves it in the grave, tucked beside the journal in the folds of the body’s heavy coat. He stands and lights a match, lets it burn to the bottom until the flame licks his fingers and he can do nothing but let it fall.

He watches the ashes drift. Then he turns away. "We should get going," he says, and does not look back.

(Somewhere near the woods, a slightly feral orange cat twitches its tail and watches the sun set red.)

* * *

 Mollymauk Tealeaf has never expected to live a long life. He pulled himself up from hell with a mouthful of dirt two years ago and has not stopped pulling since, well aware of the fateful tug that waits to pull him under. He feels it sometimes, the void of his past that lurks in his dreams, deep behind his eyelids where it threatens to swallow him if he ever stops running. Sitting here, now, he feels it again – the fear, dark and deep, an ocean in his veins.

He feels it more than ever when he sees her again, standing here in the lower floor of The Evening Nip. The others are talking to the Gentlemen, but Molly has another task to accomplish. Before him, the tabaxi’s eyes are bright with curiosity, her posture warm with a mixture of familiarity and love as she stares him down. Cree, he remembers, and an urge he cannot claim beckons for him to hug her as if she’s a sister, a long lost friend.

Maybe some day, she’ll tell him the story of who they used to be to one another. Maybe one day, he’ll ask.

“Did you need something, Lucien?” she says, breaking the silence. She sits across from him at the table, two barely touched mugs of ale between them, her tail twitching nervously.

Molly takes one last deep breath of air. Then he does what he always does. He leans forward, grins sharply, and dives in without looking back. “I need you to tell me the story of how I came back to life,” he says, and waits for the world to fall.

 


End file.
